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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing puzzle piece that locks the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.